Definition 2 of binky at
wiktionary is "(rabbit behavior) A high hop that a rabbit may perform when happy." This definition is consistent with that at
rabbitspeak, and not inconsistent with "A kind of twisting jump made by a rabbit at play" given in wikipedia. What
is the etymology of this term?

The three quotations given in wiktionary date from 1996, 2003, and 2009, while
ngrams shows the incidence of binky near zero in the 1970's and rising
steadily since ca. 1995. In web searches, I don't know how to disambiguate binky as a high hop from its other common-noun usages or its more-common use as a surname; can one do so?

The nicest illustration I've seen of a binky appears in the opening seconds of this video. (The sharpish "Aht!" and "Ech!" sounds (can someone transcribe these more faithfully?) near the end of the video are warnings from the owner to the rabbit, to make it cease chewing the furniture, which -- in the video -- it does.)

2 Answers
2

According to alt.pets.rabbits community of pet rabbit owners, it seems that Binky became a common name for pet rabbits around the same time it began to gain currency to refer to the jump, around 1996.

Binky is also the name of the rabbit protaganist in Matt Groening's Life in Hell comics, the first issue was in 1978. From Simpson Crazy:

So, for relief, he decided to send a message to his friends back home. It wasn't a boring letter telling about his unhappiness. Instead, it was a comic book about life in Los Angeles. He called it "Life in Hell". The comic strip starred Binky, the lonely buck-toothed rabbit (In 1985, he told Los Angeles magazine that Binky was the "stupidest" name he could think of) and it soon became an underground success in L.A. Matt found himself making 500 copies instead of 20. In 1980, the strip started to appear in the Los Angeles Reader, a weekly paper where Matt worked as an editor/delivery man.

My pet bunny jumps in the air and snaps his neck from side to side. What is this?

My bun Peter does this and more. He lives with a guinea pig, and seems to have adopted some of her behavioral habits. The funniest thing they do is what my vet called "stampeding". They trot around, then suddenly jump straight up (pretty high), and then shake vigorously in mid-air. At first we were worried about this (thinking it wasn't normal), but our vet assured us it was only a sign of youthful exhuberance (sp?).

Dana Krempels of the Miami HRS calls this a 'binky,' which is just the perfect word.
--lisa, mom of Ben the Binky King and Eve

In the same thread Robert Benner confirms:

Both our bunnies do the jumping and flying thing, we call them Binkies!

Other rabbit owners refer to it as "the bunny dance", "Bunnie Dancing" and report a vet using "stampeding".

Q2. In web searches, I don't know how to disambiguate binky as a high hop from its other common-noun usages or its more-common use as a surname; can one do so?

The best advice I have for this is including one or more extra terms such as +jump, +rabbit, +bunny or +hop; the plus gives it extra weight and stops it being ignored by Google.

Q3. The sharpish "Aht!" and "Ech!" sounds (can someone transcribe these more faithfully?)

Not really! How about "Ah-!" and "Eh-!"?

Edit: Here's some more research with the help from the PetBunny and EtherBun mailing lists.

Binky was coined by Dana Krempels (or her sister) in 1994 (or 1995) on the PetBunny mailing list (started in 1994 and still going strong). The term was included in Ken Albin's "UNOFFICIAL PETBUNNY DICTIONARY", reposted on 12th July 1995:

Binky - A leap in the air, usually with a 180 degrees turn while in the
air, and a bewildered expression upon landing.(Dana)

During that era a lot of us would simply make up words that somehow sounded like the actions our bunnies would make. I had 5 editions and would ask for new words each time. That is how most of the words originated on PB, from our strange imaginations rather than from rational derivations.

...

I stand by my original statement in the other email that many of the words had no real etymology. They sprang (excuse the pun) from PB'ers fertile imaginations and in most cases had some link in the mind of the creator to what the bunny was doing or how it sounded or looked.

The Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) lists “binky” as a folk term used in western Indiana as of 1912 to mean “any little mechanical contrivance,” and the word seems to have been in use for many years as a name for anything small and either inconsequential or cute.